BACKGROUND: Florida Power and Light (FPL) is among the largest and fastest growing electric utilities in the United States. As of December 2001, FPL had 9,757 employees serving nearly 8 million people, or approximately half the state of Florida. Power is delivered safely and reliably from 86 generating units, through more than 500 substations and more than 69,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines.

PROBLEM SOLVED: With a competitive job market and the desire to honor state requirements for a diverse workforce, FPL was finding it increasingly difficult to recruit, hire, administer and retain the company's most important asset  top-quality people. Prior to implementing the Informatica Application for Human Resources, FPL's line managers and HR representatives could not access the information they needed to manage their workforce in a timely manner. For example, if the HR department wanted to analyze data regarding employee turnover in a specific division to develop better retention strategies, it had to rely on its HRIT staff to create reports, which were not always easy to use. In addition, if HR representatives needed to drill down into the information, they had to ask the IT staff to create another report, further slowing workforce-optimization efforts and taking time away from other strategic projects.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: The Informatica Application for Human Resources delivers a full set of packaged metrics, reports and analytic processes to users' desktops via Informatica's easy-to-use business intelligence platform, PowerAnalyzer. It gives employees in the HR department, as well as executives, the power to analyze data and make more informed decisions quickly  without involving IT staff. By providing users with a consolidated dashboard containing key metrics regarding hiring, promotion, length of service and incentive programs, the Informatica Analytic Application enables FPL to better understand and manage each employee's contribution to the organization. This allows the company to more accurately align employees' career paths with corporate goals and improve the hiring process to meet micro and macro needs within each department. This consistently results in high performance and ongoing establishment of best practices.

STRENGTHS: The key strengths of the product are its tight integration with SAP, the capacity to source from proprietary legacy systems, its modular architecture resulting in fast implementation and "time-to- value," and its ease of use for business users. The system was implemented in approximately six months compared to the two-to-three year estimate for building a system from scratch. Additionally, the flexibility of Informatica's platform allowed FPL to roll out the project in stages, which enabled us to see business results almost immediately. Finally, business users can now easily find the information they need, when they need it.

WEAKNESSES: One negative with the current product is lack of functionality with exports to Excel. However, the next version of PowerAnalyzer addresses this issue and will allow FPL employees to manipulate Excel data while remaining within a single interface.

DELIVERABLES: Informatica's Analytic Application consolidates human-capital data into a single source and gives business users access to critical information about the company's workforce via dashboards. These information-rich interfaces allow managers and executives to more effectively acquire, deploy and support each individual throughout the organization to maximize corporate performance and employee satisfaction.

VENDOR SUPPORT: The Informatica professional services team worked closely with FPL to ensure that the project was completed quickly and specific business challenges were addressed.

DOCUMENTATION: Informatica's documentation was clear, thorough and well organized.